Scarlett Johansson Behind The Scenes With Mango

For the last three years or so, Scarlett Johansson has been the face behind the acclaimed Spanish clothing company Mango. In their latest Spring/Summer 2011 campaign, set in the Goldstein Residence in Beverly Hills, photographer superstar Mario Sorrenti builds his images exclusively with natural light and reflectors. It's hard to imagine a wet haired Johansson ever not looking incredible, so it should not come as a surprise that Mario and company produced some stunning images. Hopefully these photographs will encourage a lot of photographers to step away from the strobes every now and then and work with the best light given to us: the sun!

When I've shot model shoots, like this, with a mixture of strobe and natural light, I've found it easier to just leave the PocketWizard on top of the camera. Nothing is worse than getting into a groove, decide to switch over to strobe and realize you ahev to dig thru a bag to find the PocketWizard. Just leave it on. When you are on tight time schedules with bigger budgets, you need to be as efficient as possible with your time.

One issue I always have when lighting with reflectors is no matter how much direct sunlight is hitting them, they never seem to light my subject enough to properly expose the whole scene. Anyone have any tips on how to keep the background readable while still illuminating the subject? Or is this all a photoshop trick?

what time of day are you shooting? are you backlighting? what do you mean by background readable? Unless you have low sun, you will usually always clip your highlights if they are backlit when using a reflector.

There's a "scientific art" to finding a location and angle that is flattering to your subject while also allowing the visible background to be less bright than the other surrounding areas, so that you still have enough direct sunlight to actually use a reflector, but a background that is sufficiently not-nuked to balance well with that reflected light.

Does that make sense out loud? Look for contrast. Put your subject in the sun, roughly backlit, with a shady spot behind them to be used as the background. Obviously there are plenty of other arrangements and solutions, but when I'm shooting available light with a reflector this is the first arrangement I look for.

I think it depends what effect you are after. I like it when the sky blows out and you end up with blue tinges around the edge that go to pure white when you get to the sun, like in the images above. Maybe if you had a huge reflector it might bring the subjects brightness up enough to expose them and the sky correctly but I wouldn't want to be the poor assistant holding that reflector!

If she would have strobes on her the background would have been very dark, not blown out. So patrick is right, i cant see a way to illuminate the subject, have a proper exposure on her, AND have a proper exposure of the background. the only way i think one could achieve that is by exposing separately the subject with strobes and then the background.

i attached an example of illuminating with strobes in bright sun. Photography by Karl Taylor.

Found this video not to be all that great. Maybe a show off for all those photographers who are living the high life shooting super stars, but behind the scenes? What did I take away, that I saw a beautiful model with thousands of dollars worth of makeup/clothing/accessories and a photographer with the same in lenses and gear to go along with it?

If you want to show me behind the scenes, don't cut away into this artistic nonsense, not that I don't like it, I can't pull anything away on how someone could work with those and create beautiful imagery. Also, whats with no one throwing in outcomings in the video? Seems like I have to always wander around to try to find what the finals were.